The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
Previous entry.
9:30am on Monday, 23rd February, 2026:
Anecdote
My keyboard started messing up over the weekend. Letters would suddenly repeat unstoppably, the lights came on and danced all kinds of weird colours, and sometimes none of the keys worked at all.
I have a Corsair mechanical keyboard, which gives a nice, loud, clattering noise when I use it that annoys my wife. It's wired, because I don't like running out of batteries when I'm in the middle of something. It would run out of batteries, too, because it needs two USB connections to power it.
It did occasionally refuse to produce characters first thing after starting up my PC, the solution to which was to unplug both USB connectors then plug them back in again. This was a fraught task, because the USB ports are at the back of my PC near the power supply, and I have to unplug and replug them blind. When I tried this fix on this occasion, though, it didn't work.
The keyboard, which is programmable, is managed by a software system called iCUE. On one occasion in the past, there was an update that stopped the keyboard from working, so I had to disable it. Later updates continued this trend, so I switched off all updates. Given that my keyboard was defunct, though, I thought maybe I should update iCUE in case an update to Windows had stopped the old, stable version from working. I therefore bit the bullet and updated iCUE.
Other than removing all my programmed macros, it had no effect.
I was on the point of ordering a new keyboard when it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn't the keyboard that was at fault at all, but the USB ports. I disconnected them from the back and moved them to the front panel of my PC. It was a very tight stretch, but I managed to get them both in. These front-panel USB ports are dodgy: I use them for memory sticks and the like, but sometimes one doesn't recognise it's in use and I have to switch to the other.
Anyway, on this occasion they both worked, as evidenced by the fact that I'm able to type this.
If the USB ports at the back, which are on the motherboard, are damaged, I'm now wondering if I need a new PC. It's 8 years since I last got one, and since then crypto-mining outfits have bought up so many graphics cards that the price of those shot up. Worse, AI companies are now buying up entire production runs, along with as much RAM and drive storage as they can. I daren't look to see how much a new PC would cost. Maybe I just need a motherboard, but my past experience with buying those is that half of what worked with the old motherboard is incompatible with the new one.
I'll struggle on, I think, until the AI boom busts and warehouses full of graphics cards, memory and hard drives are dumped on the market. That's assuming my savings aren't swallowed up by the collapse of the economy or something.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).